The joys of real hardware

I'm working on building some new linux firewalls right now. It's the same redundant dual trunked interface setup I've been using for a while now. I have two identical boxes that plug into trunk ports the switches. They run heartbeat for fail over.

Here are two things to do when building machines in the real world (ie, not virtualized):

• don't put VLAN=yes in the base ifcfg configuration file. I did this and it took me about 3 hours of rebuilding network card drivers to figure it out. It turns out that the vlan code in linux can't create a null vlan for eth0 and the error message looks like you're using the wrong driver.
  
• make sure both of your network cables are plugged into the right ports. If both ports on the server show link, but only one works, you should probably check the link state on the switch.

Whoops. That's half a day I'll never get back. At least it's all running now.